Olympics:
Oh, my. I'm thoroughly convinced that Bob Costas is a puppet. Think about it—do you ever see him get up from behind the anchor desk? I'm betting there's a little guy hiding underneath it, manipulating strings and levers through his…wait, that's an ugly thought.

I'm in agreement with Jess. I think Ian Thorpe needs to be on a Wheaties box. Preferably wearing as little as possible.

Speaking of Aussies, I cringed while watching the Australian female gymnasts do their vault rotation. The girls were clearly being told to do vaults they weren't comfortable doing—it showed in their faces.Americans and their sports:
In the past couple of years I've really come to appreciate both soccer and hockey. I've often wondered why they aren't particularly popular in the States. Yesterday afternoon, while in a half-doze, a thought came to me:

"It's the scoring."

Think about it. Two of the most popular games in the States are basketball and football. Both are games with fairly high scores. Imagine the annoyance if a football or basketball game ended in a 1-1 tie!

Also, Americans seem to like games with carefully-scripted breaks. There are extended scheduled timeouts in both football and basketball. Many a football game is drawn out interminably by the coaches using the clock-stops-when-a-player-runs-out-of-bounds rule. In basketball, timeout after timeout can be called.

Not so in hockey or soccer. Play is fluid, with offense melting into defense back into offense again. (Imagine that happening in American football—yeah, right! Those 300+ pound human refrigerators can't play offense!) Perhaps that means less time to get up and go to the bathroom—or, more disturbingly, perhaps it means that the fan has to pay closer attention to the game to understand what is going on.

In American football, it's easy to tell what's going on. Just look at the scoreboard. What down is it? How far are they from a first down? Who has the ball? How long until the next break? If you know the answers to those questions, you have the game firmly in hand.

Perhaps that appeals to the unfortunate American preference for all things simple and compact. It's like political races—if a candidate can't package what they want to say into a thirty-second "message," they're never going to get elected. Because the American public can't sit still and think long enough to process anything more.

Thus, I have a feeling that it's going to be a long time before soccer and hockey take hold down here. Sometimes I just wish I lived further north, so that I wasn't the only weirdo watching the games…

Health and car news:
I put my Sundance in to be repaired this morning. It should take about a week. My rental car is a metallic silver Dodge Stratus. Four-door, seemingly auto everything. It's a bit bigger than I'd like; I'm fond of small cars. Chances are, my next car will be the smallest four-door I can find.

Enterprise was seriously understaffed this morning. I called to be picked up at 8:20. The drive to the rental car center takes only seven minutes, so I expected to be picked up soon. I wasn't picked up until 8:57. When I got there, I was way back in line. Then, it turned out they didn't have any cars in the grade I was supposed to get. So I had to wait until someone came in with a car. I got my car and left at 9:40, and got to work at 9:50. Frustrating, but what could I do? Without the rental, I'd be stuck without a car for a week.

I'm going to start studying PHP again tonight. I'd planned to do a lot of studying this weekend, but I didn't plan on being doped up on muscle relaxers and the like over the weekend. Instead, most of what I did this weekend involved sleep. Jeff helped me get the kitchen cleaned up. Tonight, hopefully we can get the rest of the laundry cleaned, folded, and put away. Then we'll be in better shape, housewise.

Sean thinks my spider plant might have a calcium deficiency. I hope it's something easily fixed; I'm a bit attached to Plantlet and have been frustrated that I've not been able to make it a healthy plant.